So I've been thinking a bit recently about AI and all the stuff in the almost-mainstream media about it. I kind of follow it with more than idle curiosity, but not much more than that, but today I came to what I think is a realization on a few things:
1. What most people today consider "Artificial Intelligence" is actually really "Artificial Skill". Even the most famous of these, Google's Go playing program, is just very skilled. Generally speaking, most things we have today are very skilled pattern recognition (and even forecasting) machines. These are "highly skilled" activities, but I don't think they are intelligence.
2. I believe that there are three characteristics that should be used to identify an AI which are vast improvements on, say, the Turing test. These two characteristics are: 1) the ability to know if a concept is correct (or incorrect) without someone telling you and 2) the ability to teach / explain a concept to another intelligent being; and 3) the ability to determine one's own goals / decide to perform tasks other than what was "programmed" and explain why those choices were made. This is a broad classification, and also generally includes "the ability to learn", which is why, say, a supermarket calculator which is "skilled" at arithmetic won't ever be (has never been?) considered intelligent. It also excludes those highly-skilled single-purpose systems.
Most expert systems we have do not really have a way to know, without outside confirmation, if they have correctly or incorrectly categorized a problem. Consider doing your homework - you will often know with pretty high probability if you have an understanding of a concept and if an answer is correct without having to check. I'm not aware of many expert systems that "know" they are correct.
And then consider the ability to educate - we have evidences of other animal life that is highly skilled, but doesn't really teach or pass on that information, and even other animals that do pass that information on. But I'm fairly certain we don't know if those species have any kind of implicit understanding of correctness or not...
Also, I fully understand that my criteria exclude some humans from being classified as "highly intelligent" - there are many people that can't teach others, and many who cannot explain why they choose certain actions, and some people who can only do things they are instructed to do. I note, though, that historically such individuals have been labeled with some form of the word 'impaired', or classified as "less intelligent" - this did factor into my use of this as a classification.
Anyway, those are my ramblings, further discussion encouraged.